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Work to Do

by Jules Wernersbach

A co-op’s past meets a labor dispute

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A co-op’s past meets a labor dispute

Set in Austin during hurricane season, the novel connects the early days of Guadalupe Street Co-op with a tense week decades later, as its workers organize for a union. The store’s founding vision—shared ownership by workers and customers—now sits alongside an aging business model and conflict among the staff. Through senior manager Roz, her girlfriend Molly, and dairy manager Randy, the workplace struggle intersects with tangled relationships. Questions of ownership and who gets to shape the co-op’s future unfold against a storm that disrupts the store itself, while the workers’ wages add a practical edge to the debate over what the co-op stands for.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in workplace fiction and labor organizing.
  • Readers drawn to stories about community-owned businesses and questions of ownership.
  • Readers who enjoy fiction combining relationship complications with social and economic tensions.

Themes

Worker ownership and unionizationCommunity and institutional changeWages and affordabilityRelationships and workplace conflict

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

 

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store's senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn't see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

 

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op's first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

 

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